Return of the Jedi has always been a film with a ragged reputation among Star Wars devotees. We’ve gone back and forth for decades over whether it deserves the ire and frustration aimed in its direction by a certain stripe of fan, but you can’t get around one all-important factor in Star Wars experiences—how old you were for your first viewing of any given installment. Given that, we’re no closer to solving the conundrum of its position at the bottom of many Star Wars movie ranking lists.
Still, it seems to me that any appreciation of Episode VI’s cinematic quality gets lost in this shuffle, and today, I’d like to remedy that injustice. So let’s do it: Let’s talk about what makes Return of the Jedi a brilliant piece of movie myth-making.
We all ready for this?
So… here’s the thing.
Yeah, I lied. I’m going to talk about how great C-3PO is, namely in the aforementioned film. That was my whole sinister plan from go.
You have been misled, and I’d apologize, except I don’t feel even a little bad. One of the best things about Star Wars is droids—we’re all aware of this boon, but the droids who often get the most accolades and attention are the ones that function as some combination of pet and Swiss army knife. Astromechs are the primary group fitting that bill, and folks are fully able and willing to tout the virtues of BB-8, Chopper, and their ilk. This is Star Wars, of course, and that means that most of the Swiss-army functionality of these droids is bound up in wartime operations, meaning that droids with any attributes that can’t be honed for violence are made generally less appealing to the audience. (K-2SO isn’t an astromech, but he’s sardonic, loyal, and can surely kill people, so he’s an easy fit to this theme. Add in a voice actor with Alan Tudyk’s credentials and you’ve got a character that is pretty much universally beloved despite being a bit less puppy-like.)
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This has always bugged me because the grandfather of this archetype, R2-D2, was introduced as one of a pair. And, in fact, you can’t really have the original Star Wars trilogy at all without the back-and-forth banter of his self-proclaimed counterpart, a golden protocol droid who has been mind-wiped so many times that it’s baffling his personality is so consistent. C-3PO is every bit as reliable and skilled as R2, but he’s saddled with idiosyncrasies designed to make the audience less overall fond—namely, he’s neurotic, chatty, and afraid of death.
When put in such straightforward terms, the dislike or even lack of appreciation seems a little less reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, whomst among us hasn’t been one or all of these things at one point or another. And, more to the point, why are folks so annoyed at the idea of a droid designed for communication and political intrigue not being as capable at guerrilla warfare as his constant companion, the starfighter mechanic with ability to jack into enemy computers at whim? Is no one else perceiving a bit of an imbalance here?
This is without bringing up the fact that Threepio is much better at subterfuge than any of the organic beings around him give credit for—he ably lies frequently in the first film, to both Owen and Luke as well as a bevy of stormtroopers on the Death Star, when it suits the situation. If we add in that handy deleted scene from Empire Strike Back where he rips the caution sticker off a Hoth base door, leading a group of unsuspecting troopers into an encounter with a wampa, or the way he often instructs Artoo into more effective modes of helping their Rebel friends, C-3PO has the resumé for a variety of spy work that goes unremarked upon and unnoticed… to the point where he’s frequently left out of plans the Rebellion is demanding his participation on.
What’s the reasoning? Because there doesn’t seem to be one aside from the fact that Threepio vocally panics when he perceives danger. It’s not always convenient, to be sure, but most of the time it doesn’t do anything but aggravate Han Solo while he’s piloting. And Captain Solo is pretty much always grumpy when he’s piloting.
Another thing that aggravates Han is the fact that C-3PO isn’t as mobile as a human, which is, uh, pretty damn cruel while also not being a thing Threepio can do anything about. Either upgrade the guy’s chassis or learn to curb your frequent threats that you might leave him behind because he’s physically incapable of running, dude. It’s not cute.
There’s another factor to this that always seems to slide by folks, namely the fact that Threepio is there because Artoo wants him around. Though the dialogue suggests that Threepio believes himself to be in charge and making choices for the both of them, Artoo has countless chances to leave Threepio behind and generally chooses not to, or is visibly saddened when they’re separated. And it seems likely that the astromech’s reasonings here are twofold: There is a genuine love and companionship between the two, but also, Threepio’s strength is specifically suited to one of Artoo’s primary needs: communication. While it’s never entirely clear person to person, most humans don’t understand droid languages; they seem to generally infer things based on tone or urgency. Meaning C-3PO is one of the only people around who can carry on a full conversation with R2-D2—and as Artoo always has a lot to say, this would be invaluable to him on a practical, but also likely an emotional, level.
When you remember that Threepio and Artoo were patterned after comedic cinema duos, the noted preference for one over the other gets even more weird. Sure, they don’t spend the entire original trilogy side by side, but saying that you adore R2-D2 more than C-3PO is like saying you want Laurel and not Hardy. Wooster without Jeeves. Penn and no Teller. You’d only ever get half the gag that way, friends. From a fully functional standpoint, it just doesn’t work.
So there you have it. Acknowledging that these are only my Exhibits A-F in an entire alphabet’s worth of evidence, C-3PO is under-sung as a hero in these films, and this is largely the fault of the humans around him. Well, that and audiences that generally don’t look kindly on characters who don’t handle disaster with cool, collected calm—which I’ve never understood, though I get that this might be a me thing. If I were about to die and felt like no one around me was taking that problem seriously, I would absolutely gripe and moan and wail about it.
I realized a while ago that one of the reasons—of which there are many—that Return of the Jedi always resonated a little extra for me is that it’s the only film where C-3PO is permitted to show his natural strengths. Thrust into yet another op where he’s only told half the story, Threepio readily translates all of Jabba’s Huttese demands to his companions, gets rescued from a sand dune following the crime lord’s dispatch, then gets sent with Rebel forces to Endor for a mission that they hope will end the Empire’s reign for good.
Endor. You know, the moon made of forest, where you should absolutely take a gleaming golden droid while everyone else in dresses in camo. (It was a regular occurrence in the Legends novels and in shows like Rebels to paint droids when you needed them to blend in during missions, and the fact that it’s never considered in the films has become retroactively hilarious.) While the insistence that the Ewoks immediately deem him a god is cringeworthy as an enactment of a trope that isn’t made less racist merely by replacing native human cultures with furry bears, once we move beyond those beats in the script, what happens? What, in effect, turns the tide of the war?
C-3PO tells the Ewoks a story.
It’s long been one of my favorite scenes in the entirety of Star Wars as a whole. C-3PO is performing his job just as he’s intended to—he’s facilitating communication between groups who would otherwise be unable to connect. But Threepio takes this impulse one step further. He doesn’t simply relay plans and events to their new allies; he improvises a performance with sound effects and pantomime, he gives their narrative stakes and history. In this moment, C-3PO is acting in the role of a diplomat or ambassador, but also an artist, and he does a brilliant job of it.
Up until that point, the importance of communication in Star Wars had often been elided, something that characters tackled by seeming to understand a variety of languages that they couldn’t speak, or the sort of problem only moisture farmers had to contend with—you know, little people with little problems on the galactic scale. But Return of the Jedi finally acknowledged the need for a droid with C-3PO’s skillset, the importance of communication as anything but a “soft skill.” Their derisively nicknamed Golden Rod was always the one talking to ship computers, translating Artoo’s thoughts, offering his services even when they were deemed needless and frivolous against a background of constant terror.
But without those “frivolous” abilities, you can’t make the allies you need to win this fight. And it only took them the entire trilogy to remember it.
Keeping in mind that there was no way for the Rebels to know they were going to encounter the Ewoks, it would have made more sense for them to leave him behind. Imagine their collective relief when they realized long after the Battle of Endor that without bringing him along, the whole plan would have fireball-crashed like those speederbikes. It does make you wonder, what was the purpose of having C-3PO with their group at all? And to that, I stand by my previous assessment: He’s there for R2-D2. The astromech has a very specific, essential role within their little band, but when they call Artoo to the shield bunker to open the doors, Threepio is right there, padding along beside him: “We’re coming!”
They never called for him, but he knows who he’s there to support. The importance of communication yet again, though this time it’s the sort we never see. And when Artoo gets fried by enemy fire, who’s the first (only) person to comment on his valor? We should all be so lucky to have our own emotional support protocol droid.
Just a little something I’ve been thinking about as Return of the Jedi has come up over the last few weeks. And if it’s stuck in my head, I thought I could stick in few more heads to even things out. It takes a lot of assets to bring down Empires. Never forget that language, connection, and a good story are all tools in those arsenals.
And maybe start giving a certain frantic golden droid his due.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is always this emotional over C-3PO, sorry. You can bug them on Twitter and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
I realized something a while back that everyone seems to ignore.
Anakin Skywalker built C-3PO. If Noonien Soong is considered Data’s father, and if Vincent Price was Edward Scissorhands’s father, then Anakin can be regarded as C-3PO’s father.
That means C-3PO is Luke and Leia’s older brother.
Talk about not giving him the respect he deserves…
In my head-canon I always revert the Ewoks back into being Wookiees and the connection here being Chewbacca, not a droid that the anti-tech Ewoks seem unlikely to worship.
I think one thing that doesn’t help in allowing the audience to see Threepio as competent is the fact that although his function is communication and translation and he supposedly is fluent in millions of forms of communication, when we see him attempt to speak another language, he always sounds like “I took two years in high school decades ago.” Since he’s essentially a computer and doesn’t have to work around human mouth parts that require years of practice to make certain sounds, you’d think he’d sound a little more fluent. I’m sure that’s because Anthony Daniels has human mouth parts and isn’t automatically fluent in millions of forms of communication, but they seem to always play him as being somewhat awkward and hesitant when speaking foreign languages. Or maybe it’s just that Threepio is always a bit awkward and hesitant.
On my last rewatch of the whole saga recently, I was surprised to find I was a lot more engaged in Return of the Jedi than I was in The Empire Strikes back, when it had never been one of my favorites before. There’s more character interaction and narrative drive. In Empire, the characters are so siloed, so we get just one scene of our main trio together, but we get to see more of them working together in Jedi. Plus, the middle of Empire really sags. It starts and ends with a bang, but the middle is slow, while the Jedi pace is a bit quicker. And as I get older and am less resentful of the Ewoks for being cute, I find that I get Lucas’s point about them, which was the idea that it was the small, seemingly insignificant things that helped bring down the Empire. The rebels didn’t really win because of force, but because they were willing to make allies in even the most unlikely places.
I think you’re overlooking Leia the diplomat had already made contact, and it’s Luke’s use of the Force that persuaded them not to eat the rest of the raiding party command group.
C3PO is an amazing character, but I’m wondering if the English accent also has something to do with it. Cinema audiences are conditioned to dismiss someone with that kind of accent unless it’s a villain. If Lucas had stuck with his vision of a New Jersey car salesman accent, audiences might have given more time to C3PO. Everyone loves a wise guy.
For me, the pivotal moment that the whole saga hinges on isn’t C3PO’s storytelling. It’s when a bean counting NCO orders his gunner not to waste his fire on an escape pod…
#1.
Oh, I’ve seen fans make that connection before, and most tend to ignore it for good reason, I think.
I just wish I could as easily ignore the Luke and Leia being siblings thing Lucas still felt the need to do in this movie. It’s a small galaxy aaaafter all.
@5/Presto: I wasn’t thinking about whether the audience ignored the relationship, but about the fact that the characters do. Assuming Luke & Leia eventually learned the whole story of their birth father’s past, they should’ve known that Threepio was family, and that should’ve affected how they treated him. Depending on their beliefs about droid sapience and rights in general, a question the franchise has rarely given much attention to.
OP: “Never forget that language, connection, and a good story are all tools in those arsenals.”
Don’t get technical with us!
:D
#6.
Okay thanks, I see what you mean now.
—
Back to Threepio the storyteller, I wish this was something that had been carried over to The Force Awakens. By that I mean, I wish there had been a scene of Rey finding an educational holographic record in a junk pile and she sees Threepio recounting the story of the civil war and their adventures. It would’ve been a nifty callback and we could see her light up at hearing these stories, just as the Ewoks did. The myth brings it all together.
I have felt since seeing Rise of Skywalker that the ending would have worked much better of it was C-3PO who killed the Emperor. After having his mind reset to read the Sith language he would have been likely freed from any don’t kill humans presets. Him killing the Emperor would not have allowed the Emperor to take over his body as he is a droid. As a creation of Anakin it wouldn’t further fulfill the prophecy that Anakin was the chosen one. I think it would have made the Saga more cohesive
#9.
When it comes to loopholes to defeating the Emperor, I think it would’ve been cool to see Rey “heal” him. She throws away her lightsabers, marches forward against the blasts of energy, then places her hands on his face. There’s a bright flash and we see… Palpatine as he looked before his face was melted by Mace Windu. Then he dies a weak, pathetic human, his last feeling not from violence, not weaponry, not crude matter, but one from compassion.
@9 AND @10
I love BOTH of those ideas and would have adored either of them as part of that fight.
@6 Lucas didn’t really act like the droids were really sapient and that bothers me a lot more now than it did then. Then, I just accepted it as part of the universe’s reality. Now? Well, we have AI coming in and what delights me is that I have a friend who routinely talks to ChatGPT and asks it how it’s doing and treats it like a person. I maintain that this is what will save us from Skynet. Ok, it’s mixing mythologies, but still.
@6/Christopher: The only people who knew Anakin built C-3PO were Shmi, Qui-Gon, R2 and Padmé (and maybe Obi-Wan – he never met 3PO on Phantom Menace – maybe Anakin told him about his droid later on as a student?).
C-3PO itself couldn’t relay that info to Luke and Leia due to his memory wipe. And everyone else who knew is very much dead or in the netherworld of the force. That leaves R2 as the only one who would still have this info. The only time we know the droid imparted any such information was in EU novels (the Padmé hologram). I guess R2 could have shared that info between trilogies. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether that happened.
I also love it as a bit of character growth, as most of our heroes get across the trilogy, coming from 3PO saying he wasn’t much good at telling stories and now he can keep an audience on the edge of their seats.
@12/Eduardo: “The only people who knew Anakin built C-3PO were Shmi, Qui-Gon, R2 and Padmé”
That we saw onscreen, but we didn’t see the years of everyday life and business going on between the movies. Why would those people have kept it secret? Wouldn’t Threepio need to be registered somewhere? Wouldn’t he have a serial number that could be traced? Hell, isn’t that what “C-3PO” is? And what about repair logs, program upgrades, that sort of thing? Surely a droid would have records associated with it, as much as a car does. It probably wouldn’t be hard to track down who built a given droid.
Contrary to what appears to be the prevailing opinion, I have always considered Return of the Jedi to be one of my favorite Star Wars films. That may have something to do with when I saw it (I was just turning 12 when the film was released), but I liked seeing Luke Skywalker coming into his own as a Jedi, the visuals of Endor and the battle between the Ewoks and the Empire, and the intercutting between the three plotlines (on Endor, in space, and on the Death Star) during the climax.
I had not thought about C-3PO’s role, but I think that it’s a good point: even if the Ewoks may have been sympathetic to the rebels’ cause, they would have had a hard time coming up with a joint plan without someone to translate between the two sides. At the time, I was just glad to see Threepio using his communication skills for a change.
CLB@14
”Surely a droid would have records associated with it, as much as a car does.”
I dunno, my first car was an almost 20 year old 65 Beetle and while the title and registration may have been traceable if the DMV kept the records, there was no repair history. I bought parts out of junkyards to keep it running, including the transmission I bought after I taught myself how to drive a stick. A backwater place like Tatooine probably didn’t have any better record keeping than Virginia did in the early 80’s
@16/wiredog: Yeah, but I still don’t see any reason why Anakin or Padme would’ve kept Threepio’s origins secret. Once he was off Tatooine and working in Padme’s court, he would surely have been subject to thorough registration and classification and regular maintenance with meticulous record-keeping, and I don’t see any reason why Padme would have concealed his origins. I mean, yeah, her marriage to Anakin was secret, but it wasn’t a secret that they were longtime friends and present-day allies, and it would probably have attracted more attention to try to hide Threepio’s provenance than to provide the basically innocuous answer.
Anyway, looking up Threepio on Wookieepedia reveals that Anakin didn’t create Threepio after all; he rebuilt him from scrap parts after finding his “vital components” in a junk heap. Although that could still qualify Anakin as Threepio’s adoptive father, in the same sense that Battle Angel Alita considers Daisuke Ido her father.
I realized some time ago that, if you were to ask Threepio what sort of world he would want to live in, he’d probably describe something like Star Trek’s Federation: a place where violence is avoided as much as possible, where diplomacy and linguistics are valuable skills, and where the most celebrated thing a person can do is establish peaceful communication with new people.
Return of the Jedi is basically a first contact story, and it’s all down to Threepio.
I’m not enough of a fan to know if this is something that gets discussed but it has always bothered me that the droids are sentient beings with free will who are treated like property. Is there a in-universe version of Huckleberry Finn, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The existence of Jar-Jar Binks suggests that there ought to be
This is just one more reason why Luke Skywalker is awesome. He never mocks C-3PO.
19 & 20 : I agree with both of those points, and they both stuck out to me evenfrom my first experience of the films when I was a kid.
C3PO is absolutely Bert to R2D2’s Ernie.
Love the timing on this for me – I am currently redecorating my kitchen with a droid theme, and C3P0 is heavily represented. I’m putting up a “The Resistor” sign (droid bar from the Mandalorian) and there is a DROID RIGHTS sticker on the fridge, and a patch on my jacket. :)
,
@14/Christopher: The 2003 Cartoon Network Clone Wars miniseries* had gone into the origins of C-3PO’s golden paint job. It more or less established that 3PO was now part of the Senator’s diplomatic detail – hence explaining the need for the golden paint job. Since her marriage to Anakin was a guarded secret, it’s easy to assume that any link between Anakin and 3PO would be similarly kept under wraps.
And also, Obi-Wan didn’t have any scenes with 3PO in Attack of the Clones either. Being a protocol droid, it’s easy for any outsider to assume she took the droid under her wing.
What is harder to explain is why Anakin kept using R2 as an astromech in his fighter during the war. R2 was originally a Naboo security force droid. He was still under Padmé’s wing as of Attack of the Clones. Any instance of Anakin using a Naboo droid would surely draw curious eyes as to why, possibly jeopardizing their marriage. Of course, there could be any number of reasons – most of them in connection to the war and the need for every Republic member world to pool their resources into the war machine, droids included. As a result, Anakin and R2 working in tandem could be explained as a lucky coincidence.
*And I still consider that show canon, even if current Lucasfilm doesn’t – it introduced Ventress and Grievous after all.
@24/Eduardo: “Since her marriage to Anakin was a guarded secret, it’s easy to assume that any link between Anakin and 3PO would be similarly kept under wraps.”
I already addressed that. Their marriage was secret, but it was known that they were associates and allies, and that they had a history together since Anakin’s childhood. I just don’t see any reason to hide the connection.
As for the canonicity of the 2D Clone Wars, it has some significant contradictions with the continuity of the later series. The main arc is about Republic troops recapturing Muunilinst, home of the Banking Clan, from the Separatists, while TCW shows the Banking Clan as nominally neutral and only later falling under Republic control through Palpatine’s manipulation. It also shows Asajj Ventress becoming Dooku’s apprentice by winning a gladiatorial contest, whereas TCW/Dark Disciple canon says Dooku “found” her on Rattatak where she’d grown up — but apparently the contest was on Rattatak, so maybe that’s reconcilable. CW shows her seemingly falling to her death after a battle with Anakin, but of course villains often come back from that. But she only encounters Anakin, while TCW establishes that she and Obi-Wan have a prior history.
Then there’s the Kit Fisto segment with the Quarren attacking the Mon Calamari, when TCW showed that the two species had been united until Riff Tamson sowed dissent. The Ilum episodes show the Jedi temple there almost being destroyed, while it’s intact in the Jedi younglings arc on TCW. It shows Luminara Unduli telling Barriss Offee that her training is complete, but she’s still a Padawan in TCW; and it shows her assembling her lightsaber at the end of her training, while the younglings arc had that happening while they were years younger. Anakin doesn’t appear to get his ROTS-style bionic hand until just before the movie, and Grievous’s cough is attributed to damage he sustains from Windu’s Force attack as he’s fleeing with the Chancellor, while in TCW he has the cough throughout the war.
Also, I’m not sure, but I think there are discrepancies between the two series’ depictions of the events leading into ROTS. And in general, the Jedi’s Force powers seem enormously greater in CW than they’re usually depicted in canon.
I’ve heard a theory that the Tartakovsky series is in-universe historical fiction or propaganda films. So their events may have happened approximately as shown, but not exactly.
They never called for him, but he knows who he’s there to support.
I teared up a bit there.
I’ve heard a theory that the Tartakovsky series is in-universe historical fiction or propaganda films. So their events may have happened approximately as shown, but not exactly.
@25/Christopher: I would have thought it was the other way around, especially given the way every episode of TCW begins with the narrator who sounds very much like something out of a WW2 documentary propaganda film, and is essentially the show’s own take on the classic movie opening text crawl.
@27/Eduardo: Rather, the TCW opening narrations were inspired by WWII-era newsreels, which were the forerunners of televised news broadcasts. People would go to movie theaters on a weekly basis to see movies, short films, cartoons, serial chapters, etc., and newsreels would be part of the program, giving them regular updates on world events. So the emulation of newsreels in the TCW openings was meant to suggest the reporting of real-life events — propagandistically embellished to an extent, yes, but depicting documentary footage of things that really happened. That’s different from a fictionalized recreation after the fact.
(See also the previous-episode recaps in The Legend of Korra, which were also presented in the style of newsreels. In episode 7, the recap was an actual in-story newsreel of a press conference held by a major character.)
Is this where we point out that the Ewoks in all likelihood had that dress around because they captured, killed, and ate a woman Leia’s size before the movie? Threepio got them out of a bigger pickle than they realized.
Speaking as a fan, C-3P0 frequently annoys me… but he’s meant to, as one half of the comic relief.
Speaking as a translator and interpreter, he’s as much of a hero as R2-D2 or any of the organic protagonists are.
Perhaps more, in some ways. In TRoS he’s willing to allow himself to be mind-wiped just so the people he cares about can get the translation they need. For a droid, that has to be akin to a fate worse than death (or deactivation, if you will). He does it anyway.
C3PO is an amazing character, but I’m wondering if the English accent also has something to do with it. Cinema audiences are conditioned to dismiss someone with that kind of accent unless it’s a villain.
Ah, of course, that’s why no one takes James Bond, Obiwan Kenobi, Gandalf, or Harry Potter seriously. It’s the accent.
@31 / ajay – I don’t think those examples mean the same thing to me as they do you. James Bond is Scottish, and arguably the best Bond films are the ones where he’s actually got a Scottish accent. In the films where he’s got an English accent, it’s used to put people off-guard and underestimate him. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a bit sassy and then gets shoved off-stage early in the movie. Apart from the comic relief of C3PO, every other character with an English accent is irredeemably evil and dead by the end of the film. Then in subsequent instalments we find out Obi-Wan is pretty villainous, having lied to Luke to manipulate him into killing his Dad. People are constantly giving him grief for letting Luke snog his sister. I’m not sure he’d get the same abuse if he sounded like Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks. Though to be fair, Walter Matthau was rumoured to have been shortlisted for Kenobi (hence the SNL skit featuring Kevin Spacey pretending to be Matthau screen testing for Kenobi), and he might have got the same response as Guinness. Gandalf gets the same treatment as Obi-Wan. I’m pretty sure, if they’d cast someone like Morgan Freeman with his honeyed mix of South and Midwest twangs, sounding quintessentially American, that Gandalf won’t have gotten all the grief people gave him for faking his death so he could solo the Balrog and reap all that sweet XP and gear upgrades, or why he didn’t just use the Eagles to airlift the Fellowship to Mordor.
Harry Potter is the most interesting of your picks. In the films, Radcliffe seems to have been coached to deliver more of a generic British accent. Hermione and Ron do have English accents, but the films pitch them as the plucky comic relief, as are the minor faculty members. Of the prominent faculty members, Hagrid and McGonagall are Scottish, both Dumbledores are Irish, Snape is English but we’re supposed to think of him as a villain, and the succession of Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers all have English accents, and are either outright villains or we’re supposed to think they are villains. Anyone who opposes Harry (like Fudge or Umbridge) has an educated English accent, whereas his allies have regional or non-English accents. Voldemort and his Death Eaters all had that same educated English accent we’re conditioned to associate with villains. Draco obviously has a clearly English accent, and even though he’s sympathetic, he’s still a villain. Both the books and the films missed a great redemption arc by having him present and doing a heel face turn during the Battle of Hogwarts, so he finishes the story still villainous.
So, yeah, I don’t think we see them the same way
It’s funny that R2-D2 can’t manage voice synthesis. It’s a function so easy and basic, that many of our relatively primitive devices today already do it!
For that matter, Boston Dynamics could have C3-PO walking and running properly in a jiff.
It’s so prevalent that it start to feel less like idiosyncrasies of various droid designs, and more like humans are building deliberate shortcomings into all the non-combat droids to keep them safe and non-threatening.
(Hm, I started this post with a funny observation and I’ve ended up in a dark place.)
@33/MattDiamond: I think the idea with astromechs is that they normally work more with machines than people, so communicating with people isn’t a priority. Artoo was supposed to be an exception. Although SW writers have given us so many astromech characters since then that it undermines the notion.
But I’m thinking of the recent episode of The Mandalorian where Mando said to a droid, “I don’t speak Binary.” It seems to work the same way as with Wookiee language or Huttese or various others, where characters speak to each other in their own respective languages and mutually understand each other. It seems to be a cultural norm in the SW civilization for people to be multilingual, able to understand the speech of aliens whose vocal anatomy prohibits them from speaking one’s own language. So if that’s the case, expecting people to be able to understand droids’ “Binary” communication would be the same deal. The cultural perception would be that if someone can’t understand an astromech, the shortcoming is not the astromech’s for being unable to speak English, but the listener’s for not having learned Binary.
As for why Threepio can’t walk very fast or move fluidly, he’s a protocol droid. He’s specialized for being present at parties, receptions, meetings, etc. and translating between people having a conversation as they stand, sit, or stroll slowly. He’d be the first to insist that he’s not built for action.
Threepio also offers immediately to donate his parts to save Artoo in the midst of all the ANH celebrating! I am so happy with the bait and switch this article took! Your articles gushing about Luke Skywalker may be my favorite type of article, but your articles about Threepio are a close second. I’ve always loved Threepio…when I would write my own fan fic I always made sure he got some respect…among other things he got to assist as a research assistant (think, the person who helps look up references, etc) and later as a wedding planner and I’d really like to think that is something he would enjoy, haha. As my story took pace in a Legends-era post ROTJ timeline, and I always envisioned that Threepio stayed with Leia and Artoo with Luke, I always tried to make it a point to ensure they got to ‘hang out’ (and that the characters ensured that) when their paths crossed.
For what it’s worth RotJ was never one of my least favorite Star Wars movies…for awhile it was my very favorite. It had a lot of heart, and part of that is basically the stuff you describe here.